Viewing Photoshop pattern files in Finder using Quicklook

Today I am writing a quick post about one of our side projects. Recently, we created a plugin for Adobe After Effects which enables you to use all of your favorite Patterns from Photoshop.

Since we already had the code to read pattern files, we also thought it would be nice to view these files directly using the Quicklook feature in Apple’s Finder application. If you did not know about this feature yet: simply press space in Finder on any file and be surprised.

Our plugin visualizes the content of a Photoshop .pat file on the fly so you can see all included patterns. This is quite handy if you’ve downloaded a bunch of patterns from the Internet since the overview in Adobe’s Photoshop is not really well-arranged.

You can download the Quicklook plugin for free, we’ve packaged it as an OSX installer—yay.

Alternatively, if you’re a power user, you can also use brew cask to install it by typing "brew cask install quicklook-pat" into your terminal.

We hope to help some of you and welcome new ideas and bug reports.